Chapter 6. SEO in Your Organization

“If you take the team out of teamwork, it’s just work. Now who wants that?

—Matthew Woodring Stover, author

As senior vice president of marketing and product at Healthline Media, Tracy Rosecrans led a redesign that turned them into the fastest-growing health information site in the United States—more than doubling their search traffic in the span of a year (Fig 6.1).

How’d they do it? Rosecrans explained:

Our overarching philosophy...that has guided our success has been [to] provide the best content...and the best user experience for every [search] query. We take user experience very seriously, to the point where we have a cross-functional team from product, editorial, marketing, and engineering that meets on a weekly basis…[We ask ourselves,] “What can we test to improve overall user engagement?” (http://bkaprt.com/seo38/06-01)

Ultimately, for Healthline, it all came down to using data, UX, and SEO to inform the site’s content strategy. By improving the entire site experience, they boosted their search rankings and earned all of that traffic.

What Rosecrans and the team at Healthline understood was that you can’t really “do” SEO in isolation from the rest of the web design process. Trying to optimize for search after the design is done creates a lot of unnecessary redoubling of work. Creating space for SEO earlier, and getting the resources and time it takes to do it right, will save you time and heartache down the line. Just be aware that it takes a lot of effort and preparation up front.

In this chapter, we’ll explore ways to earn support for organic search projects, communicate the value of SEO, make space for human-centered SEO in your organization, and measure search performance to sustain the support you need for the long haul.

Getting Buy-In

Buy-in: the magical ingredient that makes everything work. At its core, buy-in is belief. When people are bought-in, they have confidence in the value of the time and effort invested in the endeavor. They clear roadblocks, find budget, and make space. If you want to get anywhere with human-centered search in your organization, you’re going to need that kind of buy-in from executives, stakeholders, and team members—and you’re going to have to earn it.

Explain search intent

Before you can get folks on board with the value of SEO, they have to understand what it is and how it works in the first place. It’s likely that people within your organization will have a slightly different understanding of what modern SEO entails. Satisfying search intent over more classic forms of SEO, like keyword targeting, may feel unfamiliar to some. You will need to make sure the group has a baseline understanding of how modern search works with the overall user experience in order for them to seriously consider setting aside resources and budget for SEO.

Gather a few talking points, perhaps in a deck, that illustrate what modern search is all about. Whatever you do, be sure to emphasize how satisfying search intent plays a critical role in visibility as well as user experience. If stakeholders don’t understand what search intent is or why it’s important, they won’t be able to prioritize it, and all of your hard-earned insights will go unused.

Do a demo

Doing a “search demo” can also be an efficient, powerful way to engage stakeholders with SEO. Demonstrating how search works, in real time and on your real site, can reveal challenges with the current search experience and highlight the importance of satisfying search intent.

Think about some of the most critical search queries, the ones your organization expects to rank for, and questions your users might have—especially questions tied to the products, services, or information that your organization isn’t currently getting visibility for. It’s helpful to tie the search queries both to business goals and to real user needs that show emotion, like urgency or frustration. Authentic, relatable scenarios highlight real business needs and inspire empathy.

For an example of this, let’s look at Banner - University Medical Center, a hospital in Phoenix that recently completed a significant investment in their maternity ward, adding homelike private rooms and water laboring tubs:

• The business goal. One of Banner’s business goals could have been to become known as a safer alternative to natural birthing centers and home births. They definitely want to show up when someone in Phoenix googles terms like “birth center tours” or “natural birthing Phoenix.”
• The emotions behind the search. For an expecting parent, choosing where to give birth is typically a high-stress decision. During public-health crises (such as COVID-19), the stress surrounding that decision may be even higher: hospital visitor policies rapidly change, and in-person tours of birthing centers may be impossible. People who are anxious and dealing with an ambiguous situation are looking for reassurance and confidence.
• The search demo. A quick Google search for “tour birthing center phoenix az” reveals that Banner doesn’t even show up on the first page of results. Dignity Health, a rival healthcare system, wins the top spot with a helpful, actionable search listing (Fig 6.2).

When demoing for your organization, throw your critical search queries into Google and show how your organization plays into the search engine results page: 

• Where do you rank for those queries? 
• Is the meta description clear and helpful? 
• Does the content quickly address the search intent? 
• Can you easily find the answer to your question? 
• When visiting your site, do the navigation and functionality make it easy for someone to find related information?
• How quickly does the page load? 
• Is there a clear call to action or path to conversion? 
• Do your competitors do a better job at this than you do? 

Ask stakeholders to do this on their own, as well, so they can see firsthand how the user experience begins with search. Clearly, this is more impactful if you’ve found gaps in user experience and search intent that you could address ahead of time. Use this method strategically to highlight the need for investment in SEO.

Talk about the bottom line

Stakeholders are often unconcerned with SEO because they don’t realize how much poor search visibility is costing them in actual dollars. Connecting search performance to fiscal performance can be an eye-opening and very persuasive tool.

There’s no exact process for doing this; depending on your situation, some strategies might be more effective than others. There are two main angles you can take here.

If you’re already getting a significant amount of traffic from organic search, but you know there’s still room for improvement:

• First, do a little analytics homework to help people understand how organic search currently contributes to the site’s overall traffic (percentage of total traffic and business outcomes).
• Next, compare how much organic search contributes to conversions relative to other marketing channels. If you have the data to assign a dollar value to those conversions, even better. For many organizations, organic search is one of the top contributors to conversions, if not the first. Why would you not set aside budget to protect and improve one of your top-performing site assets?
• Calculate the value organic search is bringing to your site already by using a search tool, like Ahrefs, to estimate what the cost per click (CPC) would be if that traffic came from paid search instead. Typically, the SEO investment you need to make will be modest compared to the amount you’re already saving.

If getting traffic from organic search is currently a struggle and you know your site just isn’t getting the baseline organic visibility your organization needs:

• Highlight your organic search weaknesses. The goal here is to paint a picture of the search opportunity compared to the organic traffic your site gets. Is there a significant gap between the estimated search traffic around how many people are already searching for products, services, or information like yours and the actual traffic from organic search your site gets? If this sounds like the situation you’re facing, try one or more of the tools mentioned in the next step.
• Use a traffic-estimating tool (like Ahrefs, Semrush, or SpyFu) to gauge how your site stacks up in organic search against your competitors’ domains. This data, while only an estimate, can be compelling if it demonstrates that your competitors’ sites are getting significantly more organic search visibility and traffic than yours. No one likes to underperform. Hard data can make the point that SEO is something your organization needs to address.
• Take a look at the conversions you’re getting from organic search versus paid search campaigns, and then compare the budget you’re putting into maintaining your website with how much you’re investing in paid search. Sometimes it can be eye-opening to see how disproportionate the investment is, comparatively speaking.
• Look into your analytics platform to see if there has been a recent drop in traffic. If so, this can create a sense of urgency and a desire to get those numbers back up. If you’re also tracking conversions in analytics, you can then compare the conversions from organic search from before and after the drop in traffic, which will likely also show a drop and help bolster your argument.
• Use Google Search Console to understand the level of nonbrand search traffic your site is currently getting. Remember, one of the main goals of SEO is to generate visibility for those who are unfamiliar with or not actively searching for the brand or organization name. Compare the relationship between nonbrand and brand search traffic levels to see how well you’re accomplishing this goal.

With perseverance and due diligence, you can make a compelling case for SEO in your organization—and gain the support and budget you need to move forward. Like any endeavor worth your investment, you have to create space for it and ensure you have the support needed for it to thrive and become a priority; otherwise, it never becomes important enough to succeed. Let’s take a look at the groundwork you need to do to make your SEO effort count.

Integrating SEO into Your Workflow

One of the best ways to sustain SEO buy-in and keep momentum going is to have a plan for how SEO will fit into your workflow on a practical level. As we’ve discussed throughout this book, SEO isn’t just about using search data to optimize what you’ve got—it’s about learning what people need by studying the way they search and then designing a web experience that meets those needs. This requires more SEO involvement earlier in the web design process.

Now that you understand what human-centered SEO takes, you’re ready to apply what you’ve learned about integrating it into your workflow and create a plan to bring it all together.

It takes a village

As we discussed in Chapter 3, you’ll need input, resources, and support from a diverse set of stakeholders to get human-centered SEO off the ground in your organization. This is especially true if you work in an organization unfamiliar with SEO.

Secure your stakeholders

Before you begin your search project, go back over the stakeholder roles identified in Chapter 3 and think about the people in your organization. Who’s good at rallying support from leadership? Who’s good at socializing research? Who’s good at pulling together a cross-functional team? Once you’ve identified the people who might be able to help your project be successful, meet with them individually and discuss how they can be involved and what role they’ll play.

Assemble the project team

SEO is an ongoing and sometimes challenging endeavor, because the people whose help you need to implement it are on different teams and work under different management. Without the help from even one of those resources, SEO can stall out indefinitely. In order to implement SEO recommendations, you’ll need ongoing commitment from a cross-functional team, including whoever owns SEO in your organization now (if anyone), a designer, a developer, and a web writer—plus access to product managers and subject-matter experts, a project manager who understands resource allocation, and involvement from leadership who can bring such a team together. It’s wise to set up a regularly occurring project stand-up meeting with these folks where they can discuss what they’re working on, what they’ve learned, and any roadblocks standing in their way.

Project plan together

Clearly, integrating SEO takes collaboration. That’s why project planning as a cross-functional team is so helpful when it comes to uniting SEO, content, design, and user experience—especially if there’s tension between those roles or teams. We like to kick off every project, from big redesigns to relatively simple iterative site improvements, with a cross-functional project “roadmap” working session. During these sessions, we start with the project goal or end state and then ask the team to lay out all the work leading up to that end state.

A project roadmap typically includes:

• Milestones. These are specific points in time used to measure your progress toward the end goal—things like wrapping up research, completing the site architecture, or launching a page template.
• Steps. These are the straightforward steps between all of the milestones it takes to get the project done—steps like conducting user interviews, creating a site map or wireframes, or doing frontend development.
• Tasks. Individual tasks are the work required to complete each of the steps, sort of like substeps. So for “creating a site map,” you might have tasks like “organize site content into new categories” or “determine nomenclature or labels,” etc.
• Interdependencies. Once your team has laid out all of the steps and tasks it will take to do the work, you can identify areas of overlapping responsibility, shared tasks, or feedback loops needed to make sure an SEO perspective gets included when and where it needs to be.

We like to use sticky notes or a visualization tool like Miro to build out our project roadmaps (Fig 6.3).

You can use the resulting roadmap to build out a more detailed and formal project plan or Gantt chart. As a bonus, beyond making space for SEO, we’ve found that most everyone on the team appreciates this process and likes having more say in how their work intersects with other disciplines.

During these cross-functional planning sessions, you’ll also want to ask: 

• Will you include search intent in the research phase of the project? If so, how many topics will you research? How can you align the timing of that work with other research efforts so that all of the insights and recommendations have an opportunity to influence design?
• How will you address SEO in your site’s information architecture? What are the next practical steps to involve one another in those areas? Do you need to book a one-on-one meeting with someone and plan out how you’ll coordinate your work? Will this task be shared across teams or roles?
• How will you align page content, templates, metadata, and user experience to search intent and to one another? Will you do a content-planning exercise like we outlined in Chapter 4? Who would be involved in that? Who, ultimately, is responsible for doing the work in those areas?
• What is your plan for carrying over SEO-friendly design decisions in development? Will development be involved in a cross-functional SEO team? If not, what will the development handoff look like?

It can be awkward and messy to dive into all of the problems you might face as a team embarking on this work, but coming together to proactively identify potential collaboration and success roadblocks isn’t only an exercise in humility—after all, you’re admitting that something is bound to go wrong at some point—but it also helps you prepare for any issues that do arise. 

Measuring Success

We once worked with a company that came to us with an interesting problem. They had recently done a lot of organic search optimization work and, at first, it seemed like a smashing success—they’d increased organic traffic by 20 percent and everyone was pretty happy about it. At least they were happy, until they noticed the number of leads they were generating had dropped by 15 percent and the number of those leads that turned to real customers had dropped by 8 percent.

Doing a little digging, it became clear that the boost in traffic was from new content that was good at generating views—from people who didn’t actually represent the target audience. Course-correcting would mean removing some of the “popular” content and changing key messages to better align with real prospective users.

But when it came time to make that shift, marketing leadership was scared to do it, if not downright hostile about it. Their team’s success metrics and their personal job performance were tied to increased traffic. They weren’t technically on the hook for increased leads and conversions—another team was. The culture at this organization wasn’t flexible enough to change how they measured the website’s success until the next fiscal year, so marketing leadership was incentivized to choose traffic over real business outcomes in order to protect their jobs.

Sadly, this happens all too often. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Setting clear, achievable goals and having a plan for tracking their progress can make all the difference.

Identifying SEO goals

Having all the organic search traffic in the world won’t matter if that traffic doesn’t result in increased business outcomes. Your organization doesn’t exist to get more traffic or to win at search rankings; it exists to serve a specific purpose. Whether your site is designed to collect donations, communicate regulations, or sell a product or service, organic search should help you achieve those goals.

When it comes to establishing goals for SEO, avoid chasing vanity metrics like increased rankings or traffic alone, as these can lead to weak and short-sighted strategy decisions. Instead, align your organic search performance metrics with key business initiatives at your organization, like:

• increased revenue 
• increased enrollments
• increased leads and contact-form submissions
• increased donations
• subject-matter expertise
• a new product or service launch
• communication around a shift in key messaging
• new audience outreach

For each initiative or business outcome, brainstorm what trackable, tangible actions people could take on the website that would show evidence of the website contributing to that outcome. Those will be the conversions you can use to measure search performance.

Take General Electric, for example (http://bkaprt.com/seo38/06-02). In 2014, they revamped their content strategy to align it with a global audience and engage the next generation of technology investors. They hired Tomas Kellner, who had been a staff writer at Forbes for eight years, to bring a journalistic approach to covering innovation and technology breakthroughs. They also launched GE Reports, the brand’s content hub for stories revolving around the work done by General Electric in areas of tech, machinery, and advanced manufacturing. Clearly, driving engagement with this content and reaching the investor audience was a significant business initiative for GE.

Now, we’re not sure how they ultimately tracked success for that project, but a smart SEO goal for them would have been to tie organic search performance to that initiative in an effort to increase traffic to the GE Reports content hub, ultimately driving more leads from the investor relations page that’s linked to the site’s navigation.

In applying such strategies to your own situation, you could make goals like this even more measurable and specific by setting performance targets based on existing analytics data and marketing projections.

Conversions

A conversion occurs when a visitor to your website completes a desired goal, like filling out a form, making a donation, or completing a purchase. You can put conversions into one of two categories—macro or micro—to track different actions and outcomes.

Macro conversions are the primary actions a user can take on your site that fulfill a business goal. They are typically monetary-based (driving increased profit or revenue) or lead-acquisition-based (generating leads for your organization). You can identify them relative to your business goals and metrics:

Business initiative	Metric to track	Sample macro conversions
Reach new investors	Number of leads	Form fill on investor page
Increase revenue	Revenue	Order completions
Be known for specific subject matter	Number of event attendees	Webinar registration
Increase donations	Donations	Online donations

Be wary of establishing too many macro conversions. The more macro conversions you have, the more work you’ll need to do to estimate and prioritize their value. Keep things simple and trackable by choosing three to four key metrics that are most closely tied to revenue or business outcomes.

Micro conversions are all of the interactions a user can take on your site that could lead to a macro conversion. They are typically either navigation-based (visiting certain sections or pages of your site), or interaction-based (using features on your site). It’s important to track these in order to identify areas of the site (or specific content, features, or functionality) that play a direct role in generating macro conversions.

What micro conversions look like:

• reading an article
• using an interactive tool
• visiting a key page on the site
• watching a video 
• signing up for a newsletter
• downloading a white paper

Let’s go back to the GE example for a moment. If their business initiative was to drive engagement with future investors through the GE Reports content hub, their macro conversions could look like a form fill on the investor page, tracked by the number of leads that page generates. And their micro conversions would be things like organic traffic visits to articles on GE Reports, watching videos embedded in the articles, or newsletter sign-ups.

Since micro conversions aren’t revenue-based, you shouldn’t use them to measure business success—but you can and should use them as indicators that users are heading in the right direction, or to develop a better understanding of where things might be going wrong.

They say that if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Establish macro and micro conversions collaboratively with key stakeholders across your organization so there’s consensus about how everyone involved defines and measures success.

Behavioral and site performance metrics

Beyond establishing and tracking your macro and micro goals, you’ll want to keep an eye on metrics in your analytics platform to help you gauge how traffic is coming to your site, how long visitors stay, and how they’re interacting with your content. It’s important to remember that metrics are not goals; they’re just tools you can use to learn about how users experience your website. You don’t have to go overboard here—it’s best to stick to the essentials. The metrics you’ll want to include in your report are:

• Site traffic. Watch out for dramatic dips or downward trends in traffic. This could mean something’s going wrong and you need to try to figure out why, or it could signal what content is driving the loss or gain in visibility and how you can correct any issues. On the flip side, if things are trending upward or there are dramatic gains in traffic, you’ll want to learn what content is driving that increase and if there’s anything you can do to keep the positive results rolling in.
• Bounce rate. You may recall that a bounce is simply a visit to your site where the user does not visit any other pages in that session—regardless of how long they stayed on the page they visited. It’s a very neutral metric that literally does not mean anything positive or negative on its own. Bounce rates mean different things for different types of content. Define what a single page session means to your organization, or even to just specific types of pages on your site, and monitor those over time. A dramatic increase or decrease could mean something’s off.
• Time on site. As with bounce rates, time on site is completely contextual, based on your site’s content and what it’s designed to do. For some folks, less time can mean you’ve clarified your site experience and people can find what they need faster; for others, it can mean you removed in-depth content people actually wanted and so they’re leaving. The key thing here is that when you make changes to your site content, you need to understand what changes in time on site mean for that content and keep track of it over time. One thing to watch out for is time on site in comparison with page views. Shorter time coupled with high page views can mean users aren’t finding what they need (rapidly going from page to page without time to really digest the content). If you notice this, investigate the user flow and look for any issues.

  Alternatively, you could use some handy code created by Dana DiTomaso of Kickpoint that tracks a blend of these metrics she calls content consumption. You can insert this Google Analytics script through Google Tag Manager; it will allow you to track whether visitors stay long enough on a page to read your content and whether they scroll far enough down the page to actually see all your content (http://bkaprt.com/seo38/06-03).

Beyond monitoring overall site performance, if your URLs are consistent, clear, and reflect the structure of your site, you’ll be able to drill down by section to gauge relative performance for that group of related pages. The most common, and useful, forms of segmentation to measure include:

• Types of content or sections. This helps you understand how different areas of your website (specific topics, products, or services) are performing, and how people interact with various content types.
• Landing page traffic. Keep an eye out for pages with high traffic from organic search. Pages like that are typically getting search visibility and they might be the very first page on your site someone sees, so you want to optimize them accordingly. Likewise, if you notice unusually low traffic on any pages you’ve deemed important to organic search, you can flag them for investigation and improvement. URLs with high organic traffic numbers can also indicate content that’s important to users and present an opportunity to expand on that content.
• Regions or languages. This segmentation allows you to see how your regional or language-targeted sites are performing.
• Channels. You’ll want to be able to see site reporting for traffic coming from sources outside of organic search, like direct visitors, paid search traffic, social media referrals, and email.

Reporting

Keeping an eye on how your site is performing in organic search and communicating that performance to stakeholders is critical to the success of your SEO strategy.

With search algorithms and SERP design constantly evolving, performance for any website can fluctuate at a moment’s notice. Reporting not only tips you off to fluctuations, but also allows you to understand how your optimization efforts tie back to your organization’s business goals. SEO reports should provide an overview of how a website is performing in organic search, focusing on behavioral metrics, organic traffic, and whether or not that traffic is leading to macro and micro conversions.

We typically recommend creating at least two types of reports: one for leadership (with a focus on key metrics), and one that’s more of a diagnostic deep dive (where you screen for any problems and make sure all is well). Now, let’s look at how to capture and report the data for those metrics.

Reporting tools

We’ve recommended spreadsheets for nearly every document in this book, but we won’t do that here. Avoid static formats like Excel for your reporting template; manually updating data in spreadsheets is a huge time suck that will pull you away from more impactful work.

Luckily, there are plenty of reporting tools to choose from. Our favorite free tool is Google Data Studio, which provides a dynamic, automatically updating interface that ties into other data sources like Google Analytics, paid ad data, and more (Fig 6.4).

Other data-visualization tools, like Tableau and Power BI, can be costly to set up and manage over time, so unless your organization has very ambitious and tightly integrated tracking metrics and business goals, you probably don’t need them.

Whatever tool you choose, it will have all of the base functionality required to track goals and performance metrics, but you’ll still need to customize the tool’s reporting dashboard to make it meaningful for your organization. You should set it up clearly so that any stakeholder will be able to immediately understand how the site is performing against its most important business outcomes.

Most reporting tools will allow you to configure different tabs that report on different metrics. This is where our recommendation of building at least two reporting tabs—one for executives and one for diagnostics—comes into play.

Tab #1: The executive summary

Your ongoing SEO reporting for executives should include macro and micro conversions, trended data over time, and percent changes in performance (year-over-year or month-over-month). Whatever conversion data you ultimately include in your executive summary report tab, this data should:

• facilitate conversation by giving stakeholders from different teams a chance to regroup and make adjustments collaboratively, and
• help track progress on goals and prove the value of SEO to key stakeholders on an ongoing basis—enhancing their buy-in.

Tab #2: The detailed diagnostics

In addition to your executive summary tab that keeps track of conversion data, your deep-dive diagnostic should monitor behavioral data, site performance metrics, and performance for different page types or specific types of content. The detailed diagnostic section of your report should:

• enable better, quicker decision-making by establishing baselines and catching extreme search performance fluctuations when they happen, and
• help the team truly understand when and why your SEO efforts are working.

For example, you could summarize the performance for all URLs in a specific section or type of page (Fig 6.5). Summing up this data helps you understand how each page type contributes to the site total (in terms of traffic, conversions, and UX metrics) and how your optimizations impact each type of content.

Bear in mind that reports alone lack context around strategy and ongoing work. When you share performance reports, give executives the context they need to make sense of them, and keep team members in the loop on upcoming work they might want to weigh in on by including progress reports. These should list upcoming projects with expected launch dates, explanations of each initiative, and the anticipated impact on search ranking and the user experience, as well as recently completed tasks with their completion dates and the actual results of the work.

Reporting frequency

Review your report on a monthly basis with key team members and SEO stakeholders. Depending on your company culture and organizational SEO literacy, this can be as formal as a presentation with a polished deck (for those who need more context and explanation), or as modest as an in-depth email (for folks who are comfortable with analytics data and how it ties into your SEO strategy). A monthly cadence is ideal: it gives your optimizations the chance to take effect, and you’ll still catch issues with enough time to do something about them.

Outside of the monthly report, have at least one member of the team check in on performance on a weekly basis. This will help you catch any major fluctuations in close to real time. You can set up alerts in your analytics platform to quickly catch a spike or decline that needs attention. Any time you see a dramatic increase or decrease in traffic or conversions, you need to know why. Maybe something you’ve recently implemented on the site has gone wrong, like a pop-up ad that’s misfiring and blocking users from interacting with your site—and quickly removing it solves the problem as soon as it started. Other shifts, like a drop in traffic because you’re in the middle of a pandemic and people simply don’t have the bandwidth to pay as much attention to your product or service, might not be such quick fixes. Whatever the reason, a positive or negative spike in traffic is always cause for investigation so that you can change your strategy if necessary.

However frequently you review your reports, it’s important to compare the previous snapshot in time of the site’s performance to the most current view. That way, you can catch any increase or losses in traffic over time. If seasonality matters to your organization, reviewing the data from a previous season compared to the current one (or year-over-year) helps you put gains or losses in traffic in perspective with any seasonal patterns.

Communicating results

It’s wise to set low expectations for the first month or two after migration or launch because Google needs time to follow redirects and get used to new internal linking structures, pages, and content. During this initial time period, it’s pretty normal to see a decline in search engine visibility. In some cases, you might see positive results right away, but in most cases, it can take three to four months to start seeing your work pay off.

Regardless of site migrations or launches, sometimes you put in a lot of SEO work in general and, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t pay off or, even worse, organic traffic or business outcomes take a dive. Don’t lose heart. There are myriad reasons for issues like this—anything from slow crawlers to implementation mishaps to fluctuations in algorithm updates (Fig 6.6).

On the other hand, if your traffic problems are persistent, you may need more technical SEO expertise to help you troubleshoot the cause. In the meantime, when you have to share negative results with your team, remember to: 

• Reiterate the business and SEO goals related to your current project.
• State when the work started and (if applicable) when the site launched or migration was completed.
• Explain the numbers. Include the date range for data you are sharing and what timeframe you’re comparing it to. 
• Avoid placing blame on individuals or teams for weak search rankings. Remind stakeholders that strong search rankings come from collaborative, multidisciplinary work over time.
• Identify any strategic changes you recommend in response to the results. Remember: little optimizations become more impactful in aggregate—over time, small efforts can add up to larger gains. 

Your company’s reporting is more than a set of metrics—it’s a powerful tool that allows you to understand where user needs are being met and how your site is contributing to the overall goals of your organization. Done right, your reporting template can act as a North Star that keeps everyone working together toward meaningful search visibility and improved site performance.

Onward

Doing SEO right means you will be competing for extra resources and funding dollars; you’ll have to rely on the relationships you’ve built and the knowledge you’ve gained.

Just ask Daryl Hemeon, a marketing technologist at Unum Group. A few years ago, when he helped lead a site redesign at his organization, Hemeon knew SEO would be a critical part of reaching the company’s goals—but it wasn’t easy convincing leadership to make the investment. In the end, it was his careful preparation that won them over. As he told us during a phone interview:

The reason we got the funding came down to three things: the business case was strong, we had a plan that showed we knew what we were doing, and most importantly we did a good job educating people on the need for SEO in the first place.

Once he won the budget, Hemeon made sure the team had a plan to measure and communicate success from the very start. And now, you’ve got the tools to make that happen, too.